Tag Archives: nature poem

Charlie Comes to the Mountain – a new poem for Easter

It’s been a while since I’ve done a poetry video for my blog so, with Easter and spring and a smidgen of hope in the air, here’s a new one – Charlie Comes to the Mountain. I wrote it last year when we went to the Brecon Beacons in South Wales and took a family hike up Hay Bluff. It was a gorgeous day, baking hot, and there was a boy racing up the mountain, leaving his anxious siblings behind. I’d had the last line of the poem in my head for a long time, but it found its home in Charlie. Have a good Easter.

This is a new poem, so not in any collection yet – but click below if you want to find out more about my previous poetry books:

The Wandle Geese

The Wandle Geese

Bright brown, white, and black
straining, swift
against the uppermost limits
of the river-channel’s air
honking
and half-honking

come the throat-stretched geese,
nature regenerate,
unmade,
singing the quality
that flies ahead of itself

roll-calling the bounty
of the nettle-thick banks

stamping their mark
on the ducks and the coots

championing the ever-ready

and demanding renewed assault
on the beauty and mystery
grown over within.

Wandle Geese features in my new poetry book, Up in the Air:

Rise – A Christmas Poem

Rise - a Christmas poem

Rise

The vegetation, air is damp.
Branches move slightly
and the sky is grey.
Christmas is coming,
feel the mind rise.

A blackbird silhouette
jumping under the laurel.
The cut log stained black
with age and rain.
The robin around,
quick with his feathers.
Christmas is…
…the mind rise.

The river swells, gloomy grey,
and a fox, ears high,
lopes to a sibling,
fidgeting in a daytime dream.
Christmas…
…rise.

Rise features in my new poetry collection, Up in the Air, available here:

Hedgelayer

Hedgelayer - Steve Griffin poems, Up in the Air

This poem was written during a time when I did a lot of volunteering for wildlife trusts and other environmental groups. Amongst other things, I learned how to build a drystone wall, coppice woodland, and lay hedges, in some beautiful parts of the country. There was always something magical about being outside, working with a group of like-minded people, whatever the weather.

Hedgelayer

A man, a man I could have loved
starts to shade, to shade the morning mist.

He is beating stakes, stakes into the clay
forcing them past stones, stones and steady roots,
the things weak within the earth
and the things that hate to move.

As I approach he takes his shape assuredly
from the frail and wet white air,
a seamster weaving hazel whips through the hedge,
outwitting the final challenge of scratch and rip.

In defeat the hawthorn rests its useless claws
uneasily against itself, uncertain how to act.
Then feels the sap rise, rise again in its veins,
and knows that it is elect.

Hedgelayer features in my poetry collection Up in the Air, available here: